swaaye wrote:

The 1 MB chips are around 50W. It's a bit more than the other PPros but the same cooler should work. Adding a larger fan might be worthwhile if the original fan is a dinky 40-50mm thing. I have a 70mm Athlon fan attached to a stock PPro heat sink.

AllUrBaseRBelong2Us wrote:

Do most of the 200's seem to overclock without any trouble?

I have seen stable and unstable chips.

One could go with a more modern cooler if need be, tiny amount of epoxy at the corners and GC Extreme above the core and cache then all is set.
Socket 4 and Socket 8 builds really do require decent cooling.

You really don't need more than some extra airflow (because the typical 40-50mm fan is a joke). Forget that goofy epoxy+paste idea. Ack.

Same chipset as op, Intel 440FX, intel branded with last bios tho, will accept IDE drives up to 128gb without an overlay!
Been taking me forever to finish this build as I've ran into a new problem with NEW sata III drives not being able to negotiate their speed down to sata I speeds with the majority of Sata I controlers I own... SIL3512 was what I found to be the last sata I controller to play nice with modern sata III drives.
The 440FX also seems to hate every CF card I stuck into it. Fine in PIO mode, enable DMA and it goes crazy, corrupting whats on the card 🤣 .
I'm running it passive because its the only socket 8 heatsink I got, not that it matters with the case I choose for this computer, its being cooled better then it ever was in its original housing.

Heres a Picture of the mobo in the case.

Hardware from left to right is a Enermax 350watt PSU, Intel ISA 10/100 nic, SB32-32mb, Geforce4 mx440se, via USB2.0 card with a front header, Voodoo II 12mb, unbranded Sil3512 sata I controller with a bios date of 2008, 128mb of edo, PPro-200-256k.
Drives are 1x maxtor-ide 60gb, 1x WD-1TB-SP-S3, 1x Segate-1TB-SP-S3, 6x-CDRW-IDE, 16x DVD-IDE.

I'm glad I saved this computer, this is easily turning into one of my favorite builds.

Here is a picture of it outside the case.

since learning about this undocumented 3.5x jumper, its now running at 233mhz quite nicely, will see if it proves stable over the next few hours.

Couple hours later and seems stable so far, and the heatsink never gets hot enough to burn me.

AlphaWing wrote:

Intel 440FX, intel branded with last bios tho, will accept IDE drives up to 128gb without an overlay!

This is something I've been wondering if I should address on mine. I have a 20GB drive, but the BIOS will only see it as an 8GB. For Windows 98, perhaps that's fine if there are no other hidden problems that go along with the BIOS reporting the wrong drive size (I don't know?).

Since the board has a Gateway BIOS, I don't know if there's any way to get the OEM Intel BIOS on it. (Does anyone know?)

Does the SIL3512 SATA controller you mentioned have its own BIOS and bootable drive support? I was thinking perhaps if I found a good drive controller, then the system BIOS drive support wouldn't matter and I could use newer SATA drives. It would be nice to find a modern SATA controller with the same quality build as the old Adaptec 2940's. Most that I see are cheap and people complain about them not being bootable.

Excellent looking build, BTW. What PSU are you using?

F2bnp wrote:

I've heard the PPro 16bit debate a lot on the net, but I haven't found conclusive evidence.

The issue stems from the register renaming. When you use partial registers (16-bit or 8-bit portions, such as ax, al and ah), each part gets renamed to a separate internal register. When you the access the full 32-bit register again (eax), the pipeline is stalled because all internal registers need to be combined again.
So the actual performance problems depend a lot on the code you're running. If you don't use partial registers at all, it will perform at full speed.
So, 32-bit DOS/Windows games will generally work quite well on a Pentium Pro. 16-bit games won't, but they are aimed at 386 and lower anyway, so speed is no concern.

In the Pentium II, Intel fixed the partial register issue by having an internal flag. If you zero a register before usage, it will remember that the whole register was 0, and it will skip combining when you access the full register again. This fixes most issues with 16-bit code, but there are still scenarios where a Pentium at the same speed is faster, when a lot of partial registers are used (it still needs to recombine in cases where not all parts were 0).

I have a Compaq Deskpro 6200, which has a Pentium Pro 200. I use Windows 98SE on it, as a development box for my PowerVR PCX2 stuff: http://youtu.be/0P6MW1mn0Eg

Card not being bootable usually has to deal with the mobos bios then the card.
Some cards will ignore Optical disks attached to them tho.

Sil cards have 2 bios, you can use, IDE and Raid, if one doesn't work the other probably will.
I am using the IDE bios, I don't need raid for this build.
You can get the very latest bios for a Sil card here, it doesn't matter who made it\rebranded it, you can reflash it to the reference bios.
http://www.siliconimage.com/support/

I know Promise cards work ok if the drive is Sata II or less. I've used them alot too and the drivers are still available for 9x on their website.
I have just run out of sub sata III drives and getting anything less then sata III locally is very hard now.
Hard drives are something I don't like to order through the mail, especially old used ones.

That Powersupply in that build is an Enermax eg365-P-VE
I've had alot of them, and they are really good for Athlon systems. 32A on the 3.3 and 5v rails 26A on the 12, and still has the -5v rail.
The irony is that case is also Enermax 🤣 .

As for updating the bios, does the intel utility give you an error?
The bios is still on intels website. Mine actually came with the latest bios already updated on it, which was a real surprise to me, as the PC case it originally in was in really in bad shape. The computer had no case covers or top, and was rusted in the back.
I'd expected who ever owned it never would of updated it, not caring 🤣 .

I think there are controller cards with BIOS that are dependent on the motherboard BIOS (such as the MB BIOS having a SCSI option under boot options), and then there are cards with BIOS that run more independent of the MB BIOS, like the adaptec controllers did. I remember having the problem years ago trying to get a cheap SCSI controller to boot on my machine and nothing I could do would make it. Then someone told me I needed a card with its own BIOS, so I got the adaptec, and it worked fine.

I still have a 2940uw, so I may just scrounge ebay for some old 4GB UW SCSI drives if they're cheap enough.

Yeah, I got some sort of error when I tried to do the Intel BIOS update, but I can't recall what it was. Then read online I would need a Gateway specific BIOS, but that may be hard to find.

Enermax PSU looks good in that system.

I like the vintage stuff, but yeah, those old cases are often just too beat up and too nasty to retain.

Well I haven't ran into a PCI Sata controller that did not have its own bios myself.
You should be safe for those, and I know all the Promise ATA controllers for IDE devices have their own bios too, and can be booted off.
If you have some large ATA 100\133 drives to use.
9x treats both as SCSI devices once the drivers are loaded.

5.25 floppy drive finally arrived and is installed and working. I was able to get Leisure Suit Larry 3 installed (hey, its the only 5.25 floppy game I have 😀), but there's no sound. I'm using a Soundblaster AWE64 ISA card. I've read that to get sound for DOS games in Win98, I need specific DOS drivers. Anyone know if this is correct, and/or where to get the correct drivers?

http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=13
Great ISO with every driver for the Awe64\32\16.
Just use the autoplay installer in windows for a quick install (it'll add the dos drivers), but you can do everything manually too.

AllUrBaseRBelong2Us wrote:

5.25 floppy drive finally arrived and is installed and working. I was able to get Leisure Suit Larry 3 installed (hey, its the only 5.25 floppy game I have 😀), but there's no sound. I'm using a Soundblaster AWE64 ISA card. I've read that to get sound for DOS games in Win98, I need specific DOS drivers. Anyone know if this is correct, and/or where to get the correct drivers?

This could help. MS-DOS mode is not that straight forward.

AlphaWing wrote:

http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=13
Great ISO with every driver for the Awe64\32\16.
Just use the autoplay installer in windows for a quick install (it'll add the dos drivers), but you can do everything manually too.

Thanks much. I'll give it a shot.